Re: FAQ: MSDI Related Question

On Sat, 4 Dec 2004, Ruth A. Kramer wrote:

> Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 07:59:48 -0500
> From: Ruth A. Kramer <rhkramer@fast.net>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Cc: Bergesio Alejandro <arbialsoft@arnet.com.ar>
> Subject: FAQ: MSDI Related Question
>
>
> Bergesio Alejandro <arbialsoft@arnet.com.ar> asked:
>
> my question is: why abiword open each new file in other window, and the
> 'window' menu not is present.

In abiword there is a Document menu which is almost the same as the Window
menu Microsoft Word uses.

Microsoft abandoned the complicated Window in Window (WiW) model after
Microsoft Word 97 in favour of the Single Document Interface (SDI) and the
Abiword developers also favoured the greater simplicity of this model.

The beauty of SDI is that Window Management is left to the Window Manager
and the task list and the application developer is not forced to mess
about with all kinds of window layout details. Having one window
represent one Single Document is also considered to be a simpler more
lifelike concept for normal users to immediately understand.

On many platforms Abiword uses the toolkit known as GTK which deliberately
does not make it easy to create MDI interfaces.

Recently one of the developers expressed some interest in eventually
allowing a Tabbed Document Interface similar to Mozilla or Gedit but in a
way that would be unnoticable to the ordinary user. (I think it may have
been Martin Sevior) Some users have long been requesting a Tabbed inteface
but if it happens it is likely to be available in the GTK based versions
of Abiword first and not necessarily in the other versions of Abiword.
There is a bug report in the Abiword Bugzilla to track this issue.

Designers generally recommend against Tabbed Interface designs and prefer
to see improvements overall to the desktop task list rather than
reinventing the window manager task and task list inside each application
(and risk making the same mistakes that MDI suffered from). Developers
are also encourage to improve their applications so that creating a new
window is not disproportionately slower than opening a new tab (I'm
talking about Mozilla here).

> As always, if anyone can improve the answer in any way, please do so.

Hope that helps but I'm "allergic" to wiki so I encourage others to add
the bits they thought were most useful or relevant.

- Alan H.
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Received on Mon Dec 6 17:29:19 2004